Modizer

Amazing little MOD player app with lots of cool real-time visualizations, a built-in file browser, playlist editor/manager, multiple underlying playback engines (including OpenMPT), and automatic online database search. Sadly, bugs plague this badly-neglected app. On iPad Pro 10", trying to use the pattern scroll visualizer causes the app to crash. On iPhone, you can get the app to crash in various edge cases (example: open the app and hit "play" to play the last song the app previously played, and the app will crash if the underlying file for that song has been deleted/moved and no longer exists). It's a very frustrating app to use with all the crashing. I have to give it at least 4 stars for being the ONLY app of its kind in the App Store and for using the highly-compatible OpenMPT playback engine. But I have to deduct a star for the crashes and lack of updates.

Modizer has some awesome things about it and some terrible things about it. The awesome is that it plays just about all of the modern file formats used for legacy game music. You can literally have thousands of game soundtracks from platforms like NES, Genesis, and arcade, to less popular stuff like Atari ST, PC-88, and MSX. The interface for adding new OSTs is intuitive, the tracks are usually bit accurate, and they take up barely any room at all. But it’s not all roses. The playlist functionality is unusable, and the random track feature only plays the first tracks out of any given pack. By far the most frustrating issue, however, is the fact that the app periodically needs to “update the database”. I don’t know what is in this database, but it takes FOREVER to update. Case in point, today I tried to do it, and gave up after about 20 minutes. You have to click update, and leave your phone alone, because if you put the app in the background, it will reset and you’ll have to start over the next time you try to use the app. This basically forces you to choose between not using your phone or not using the app, every few weeks or month or however often it gets an updated database. As much as I love the pros of this app, I don’t love it enough to put up with such nonsense.

This is a great app for playing video game music on iOS. However, the interface needs some tweaks for the notched iPhones, since the volume bar at the bottom is unusable since it’s behind the home bar at the bottom of the screen. Also, most PlayStation audio files don’t work for some reason. Other than that, I like the fact that you can download your music files directly from its own browser and it will add them to the library automatically.